Can people get even dumber? Forgive me for the cynical view of my own species but … well, some of my best friends are human. Actually dumber is not quite accurate. Can they get even more ignorant? If our lack of interest in anything besides ourselves wasn’t bad enough, now humanity is being aided and abetted by the latest in technology.

To wit, this advance being unveiled at the MSN homepage:

The average American spends 66 hours a month online. While publishers can't make readers spend all of that time on their webpages, they can make sure readers are engaged with the brand, even if they are spending time on another domain.

However, it will require a few helpful tools:

The Atlantic is looking to a new commenting system to help increase reader engagement on its newly redesigned website.

The Atlantic, a 150-plus-year-old magazine that publishes in print 10 times a year, covers culture, business and politics. The website redesign, launched earlier this week, is designed to better integrate magazine content, blogs, videos and other Web content around seven topic areas.

 The Columbia Journalism Review just released a report called "Magazines and Their Web Sites".  It's possible to draw a conclusion from the findings that magazine websites are more likely to be profitable if they put "web guys" in charge and don't worry much about things like copy editing or fact checking.  Well, you might think that if you confused correlation with causality.

About a year ago, many brands at Reed Business Information drank the Twitter Kool-Aid. I recently analyzed how things were going, and learned quite a bit about the benefits and challenges of Twitter within business media. Today, I want to share some metrics of our use of Twitter and explore what it means for B2B media brands.

I looked at the use of Twitter across 35 RBI brands and close to 60 employees. Here is some data:

This month, dozens of the world's leading thinkers converged on Long Beach, California for the Technology Entertainment and Design conference (better known as TED). The audience and speaker schedule for TED consists of CEOs, former presidents and best-selling authors (see this year's list) challenged with “giving the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes.